I thought I was cool
Walking to Equinox Soho
In my Canada Goose
At 0 degrees in the Manhattan Winter
Only for my panache to crumple instantly
As a pleasant cigarette smoke wafted into my nose
From a nameless dark man
In a thrifted French beret
And cheap leather jacket
Eclipsing me like I was nothing
As he read Poe out of a hardback
Draped on the ground
Over the nondescript metal stairs
Between John Fluevog and Prince Street Pizza
Effortless
Maybe here he had found the meaning of life
And the Equinox was fucking closed
I’ve been chatting with a few female friends about dating.
Dating in New York, they say, feels like every guy operates with the emotional depth of a vending machine: Insert coin, select option A (situationship) or B (serious), dispense relationship if available.
Meanwhile, I’ve had conversations with guys who brag about “only doing long-term relationships” as if it’s a personality trait, a mark of maturity, and “situationships” are beneath them. There’s some cognitive dissonance between these two observations, and it got me thinking about how I understood relationships when I was younger, and how I suspect many men still do.
I think for a lot of men their understanding of relationships stops developing shortly after high school.
Reverberations:
Waves flooding a hollow trunk
floating in a rice field. 1
The husk splits,
roots finally spreading
into soil I’ve been taught to reject,
for it was, after all, beneath me.
How hard it is
to support yourself
with both feet off the ground.
I am bamboo now-
hungry for growth,
nourished by the music
of both earths
that claimed I didn’t belong.
Eyes open
to the melody I’d always been:
not broken, not foreign—
the indigenous harmony
of in-between.
Author’s note: This poem alludes to the shame I felt of being an outsider, Chinese, growing up in a predominantly white community, and my recent coming to terms with and becoming proud of being Chinese.
A reference to Jay Chou’s 稻香 that I had been listening to ↩︎
The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku. It means acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.
I do this constantly myself, at times unhappy for being wasteful, but there was part of me that loved it. Having the books on my shelf signals something positive and meaningful to me. So I asked myself, why am I ok with buying books I won’t read when the internet has everything?
Well, the internet is infinite, which is why of course everyone that has a cell phone is imminently informed on all topics all the time. Oh, is that not true?
I think the realization became clear when one day I watched a senior employee in action versus a junior. The junior didn’t even know what to search for.
There is a huge difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
